For this 50th podcast of Go See a Show!, I present to you an episode recorded half a year ago, but that might be one of the most interesting interviews I’ve done.
As part of last summer’s Underground Zero Festival, The Assembly presented HOME/SICK, a brilliant, personal, beautiful, and exhaustively researched show dramatizing events in the history of the Weather Underground.
Though I knew when I recorded it that I wouldn’t be able to get this interview up before their show closed, my apologies to the good people at The Assembly for taking half a year to post this.
But it seems it was somewhat serendipitously timed, as the show was one of the last to occupy The Living Theatre’s space on Clinton Street, which was recently shuttered. Reports of the demise of The Living Theatre as a company have thankfully been greatly exaggerated (guilty as charged; see the GSAS! Facebook page for my mini-obit on the company), but whatever the current state and future of the company, here’s wishing all best to Judith, Brad, and everyone at The Living Theatre for this next chapter of the company’s long and amazing history.
Listen in as director Jess Chayes, dramaturg Stephen Aubrey, designer Nick Benacerraf, and actor Edward Bauer, all core members & artistic directors of The Assembly, discuss complicated empathy, theatre as a political act, and why the company looked to a radical political movement from over 40 years ago to create a play in the relatively peaceful U.S. of 2012.
“I don’t trust a mission statement that you can achieve on the first try.” Continue reading
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The theatre is “a place for seeing;” a place where we can ask the big difficult questions about what it means to be a human being in the world we’ve collectively made.
